Cancer cells don’t know they are cancerous! Though this may be an obvious fact even a so what fact to many, if we think more critically about this we realize that it is quite significant. Why? Unlike other cells, cancer cells grow uncontrollably and without limit and in so doing attack the viability of the body they live in thus leading to the death of both their host and themselves. So if they knew they were cancerous then they’d stop killing the body upon which they so much depend. No reasonable cell would behave in a way that diminishes its viability. Continue reading
Month: April 2013
Act On Cue Or Take The Lead
A recent essay about eliminating targets by John Wenger caused me to think again about the all too common misguided practice of setting and managing numerical goals. What I am coming to understand more deeply is that most if not all in management aren’t doing the wrong things—such as managing by the numbers and by results—on purpose they are doing them on cue. What do I mean by this? Continue reading
Leadership or Dictatorship
Today, America’s captains of business and industry command increasingly vast sums as compensation for their services. Accordingly, there is an enormous disparity—on the order of 325-to-1—between what the average paid-worker in an organization gets and what the CEO gets. We refer to these captains of industry as business leaders: But are they really? Continue reading
Analytics on management
There appears to be an enormous amount of interest in using data (a.k.a. analytics) as a management tool for gaining some degree of certainty of performance through better control of the tasks and the task doers of an enterprise. In fact analytics seems to be the beginning and end all of management these days. After all, as Lord Kelvin asserted ‘to measure is to know” and “when you can measure what you are speaking about, and express it in numbers, you know something about it; but when you cannot measure it, when you cannot express it in numbers, your knowledge is of a meagre and unsatisfactory kind.” This is all well and good if we are dealing with pure mechanical systems, systems with no inherent will or self-initiation and that function according to laws of physical science. Continue reading
Gregory Gull 